Publications Repository - Gdańsk University of Technology

From a sustainability perspective, achieving a greener future with a minimal carbon footprint requires maximizing waste materials' reuse. The four pillars of satisfying customer demands are processing, price, properties, and performance. Along with such a global policy, this work seeks to utilize waste printer ink (WPI) as a source of carbon in combination with low- and high-surface carbon black (LCB and HCB, respectively) additives to enhance the performance of natural rubber (NR). Using WPI together with NR underlines the importance of this work from a sustainability angle. By altering the type and amount of CB and WPI content, a broad properties window was unravelled, such that a very high elongation at break of ~970% and elasticity of 53% were achieved under optimized conditions and formulation compared to 385% and 27.5% assigned to the reference (or neat) NR. Thermal stability was also changed quite broadly, depending on the formulation. The volatile organic compounds (VOCs) analysis revealed that propanol and its derivatives were the most abundant volatiles detected, accounting for above 85% of the total emission. Analyzing environmental contamination and properties investigations opened avenues to standardize the usage of WPI and CB additives in NR compounding.

Authors

• dr inż. Aleksander Hejna,
• Paulina Wiśniewska link open in new tab ,
• dr inż. Daria Kowalkowska-Zedler link open in new tab ,
• Jerzy Korol,
• dr inż. Paulina Kosmela link open in new tab ,
• dr hab. inż. Mariusz Marć link open in new tab ,
• Peyman Ezzati,
• Marek Szostak,
• Mohammad Saeb